


Infinite Highway

by lilacsigil



Category: X-Men (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Post-X2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-01-03
Updated: 2007-01-03
Packaged: 2017-10-25 17:30:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/272921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilacsigil/pseuds/lilacsigil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rogue has seen a lot of things on her travels, but it is still a surprise to meet Scott Summers, who has been presumed dead for some years.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Infinite Highway

Marie – more often known by her handle, Rogue – had been on the road for twenty days and expected to be driving for at least another ten. Not that she cared: she didn't even bother to rent an apartment these days. She just stayed in some dingy motel and caught up on sleep, waiting out her required thirty-four hours until she could start her new work-week. She travelled, as she'd once said she would, all over the United States, and over a good part of Canada, too. Places looked a lot different from the last time she'd gone this far, a scared sixteen-year-old hitch-hiking and stealing her hungry way north, desperate to get away from her past and her self. Now she was in control. Her resilience and rootlessness were assets to a woman who drove an eighteen-wheeler for a living. It wasn't ever going to make her wealthy – no-one was in this business for that – but the constant movement kept the ghosts from her head and her old friends from her door.

Rogue had gotten into trucking by complete chance, but now it was hard to imagine her life without her rig. The cure for her mutant power hadn't worked as well as the advertising claimed, but it had been enough, she thought, to stop her from being a freak, the untouchable girl with the deadly skin, the cautionary tale about what being a mutant could cost. She could touch people now, and her power only occasionally hiccupped into life, though the longer she stayed in contact with someone, the greater the likelihood, as she and Bobby had found out that first night she stayed in his bed. Suddenly able to hug, kiss and wear skimpy clothes like any other teenage girl, it didn't take her long to realise that it wasn't her power that set her apart, after all. It was something within her, an instinct that would not settle down and fit in, but would fight for independence as much as survival, no matter the cost. The first cost, of course, was Bobby, the kind of boy who would care for a wounded animal but never understand why it continued to attack him. Even when she deliberately hurt him, accusing him of lying, he tried to calm her and win her back with the truth. Rogue was no longer able to deal with sincerity and the intimacy it implied.

The Xavier School was a polarising kind of place. It was so easy for the students to find heroes and villains in every conflict, and to dress every argument up in the bright colours of epic battle. It wasn't long before Rogue and Bobby's personal life was completely co-opted into their little society's story. Rogue, of course, was the villain, trying to divest herself of their shared mutancy, then daring to attack the hero when he treated her kindly, despite her unworthy nature. Rogue didn't really care about the hostile stares of the other students, but she would be damned if she would be reduced to some two-dimensional bitch so they could feel comfortable in their view of the world. Instead of hanging around to live down to their expectations, Rogue simply left it all behind. She stayed long enough to earn her high school diploma, out of respect for Professor Xavier, Mr Summers and Doctor Grey, and then walked out. She worked all kinds of jobs, from fruit-picking to handing out shampoo samples at stations, travelling on when boredom hit. Most of the jobs were waitressing: she was unafraid to work the night shifts at the isolated truck stops, and she was a skilled hand with the coffee machine.

Over time, Rogue got talking with a few of the younger truck drivers, and even slept with a couple; she only regretted her actions when they drove away and she was left behind. From their conversations, though, she learned how many trucking companies were desperate for employees who would work the lonely long-haul routes. When she found out that they would even organise driver training, she signed a less-than-lucrative contract the day of her twenty-first birthday and, with a bare minimum of training, hit the road in a company-owned truck.

Despite being young and female, Rogue's willingness to spend unpaid hours waiting around for the next load stood her in good stead with the dispatchers, and she was never without a load to haul. A practiced catnapper, she even started to enjoy the little gaps in her schedule – if she wasn't sleeping, she could wander around the little towns and grimy cities. For a while she'd taken photos, but found that her own mind was a far more satisfying place to store her memories. Besides, cameras could be stolen, and she hardly wanted to print the photos and end up with more clutter sliding around the bunk in her rig. Rogue travelled light.

She was not entirely untied from her old world. Every few weeks she would send a postcard back to Bobby, Piotr or Kitty at the school, and not just because it reduced the likelihood of anyone thinking she was in trouble and coming to find her. Occasionally she’d send one addressed to Logan; she’d be surprised if he was still living there, but just as surprised if he didn’t drop in every once in a while. When she heard that Pyro had been arrested in Los Angeles, she sent him a postcard from the Alamo. He’d appreciate that. Once, she was even brave enough to send a postcard to her family, though she was all the way over in Vancouver when she did it. She enjoyed these small, one-sided communications: her habit of solitariness was not yet absolute.

 

Late one October evening, Rogue was stuck outside Annapolis, waiting for the shippers at the distribution centre to reload her trailer. It was getting dark, and it would be a good eight hours before she could roll out, headed for Indiana. She didn’t feel like catching a nap – maybe it was the icy wind blowing up from Chesapeake Bay that was making her antsy – so she pulled on her old green hooded coat, and got a taxi down to a bar to have a drink, watch some TV and spend some time with people she didn’t know and would never meet again. The bar nearest the distribution centre, recommended by several of the receivers, was small and the vinyl seats had duct tape over the cracks, but the TV was big, the heating was turned up, the after work crowd seemed friendly, and there were pool tables. Rogue settled down comfortably in a booth near the TV with a chicken sandwich, fries and a beer, vaguely watching the football replay, but really just enjoying the currents of conversation flowing around her. There were two other truckers in the booth across from hers, though she felt no obligation to greet them, a whole bunch of men and women who'd been working in the local outlet mall, and more from some kind of factory, and a fair number of fishermen, mostly at the bar.

Picking at the last of her fries, Rogue drifted off a little, only to be woken by a loud cheer from over by the pool tables. She quickly checked her watch, but she still had more than three hours before she had to go. Flipping back her hood, as she was now really quite warm, she looked over to the pool tables, where the fisherman were cheering and the factory workers booing. One of the fishermen had cleared the pool table in three clean shots, much to the delight of his friends and the annoyance of his opponent. Rogue smiled behind her hand, reminded of Mr. Summers and his endless solo games in the rec room, because no one would dare play against him.

She sighed. The guy in the brown sweater being clapped on the back even looked a bit like Mr. Summers, though without the glasses. He turned to speak to his defeated opponent, and Rogue suddenly sat up straight in her seat. That man, surely, was Mr. Summers. Without his glasses, playing pool in a bar in Maryland, and, most puzzling of all, alive.

Rogue quickly slumped down in her seat again, not wanting to catch the attention of, well, whoever that guy who couldn't possibly be Mr. Summers was, but she was too slow. He'd caught sight of her sudden movement, and that, Rogue knew, was another sign that the man was exactly who she thought he couldn't be. He squinted across the room at her, and recognition flashed across his face. He was much easier to read without the heavy red glasses in the way, Rogue thought, before immediately banishing that analysis to wherever it is that traitorous thoughts go. She shook her head to clear it, and the man in the brown sweater had pulled away from his friends to sit opposite her in the privacy of the booth.

"Rogue?" he said, and she felt like she was going to vomit as amazement and terror warred within her. It really was him.

"How the hell are you alive? And why the hell are you here?"

"I could ask you the same – well, the second question, anyway."

"So?" Rogue narrowed her eyes suspiciously, in order to keep the incredulous smile off her face.

"I don't know how I'm alive. Jean was there, and she…" He made a gesture as if he was pulling something from his eyes. "I woke up, totally naked, beside a highway nearly two hundred miles from Alkali Lake. No glasses, no power."

"Even with no powers, you could have helped us, Mr Summers."

"Scott. Please, call me Scott. I was unconscious, or somewhere else – I don't know where I was for those missing days. With Jean, maybe. I know I didn't wake up until she died." He spoke in an offhanded way, as though he had gone over the events so many times that they no longer carried emotional weight, but were simply a tactical exercise.

"So you cleared out? Didn't let anyone know?" Rogue fiddled with the label on her long-since-drained beer.

"Jean was dead. The Professor was gone, too, and it wasn't my home anymore. I've gotten past thinking that I owed anyone."

"You could have dropped by," Rogue muttered, thinking of those painful weeks as the school lurched back into life.

He shot a pointed look at her ungloved hands. "I can see you've been spending a lot of time there yourself, since you took the cure."

Rogue glared at Scott, now, openly angry. "Maybe if you'd come back there it wouldn't have gone all 'us and them'! You think about that?"

"And maybe I'm sick of being 'them'. Jean died because of that kind of division. Humans and mutants. Peaceniks and warlords." It was weird to see Scott's whole face, and the expressions flying heedlessly across it, like seeing him naked.

Rogue relaxed, and poked a french fry in Scott's direction. "Yeah. I know what you're talking about. I got the cure, and I went and got myself a life. Just a regular life, I guess, away from all that stuff. I drive an eighteen-wheeler, now."

Scott looked a little startled, but took the cold fry and ate it.

"Seriously. Best job I ever had."

"Actually, it suits you. You always were more self-sufficient than was good for you."

"You’re one to talk, Mr. Team Leader with No Team. What are you doing in Maryland?"

"I work here. Well, out on the bay, on the Arcadia. She's a fishing trawler."

Rogue took one of Scott's hands in hers – pleased to note that he didn't flinch, even though her gloves were off – and touched his rough palm.

"Hard work?"

"Yeah, but so is driving a truck. And at least I can go home at the end of each trip knowing I've done something I can actually see and touch. After the X-Men, that's pretty satisfying."

"After trying to teach crazy mutant kids, you mean."

"That too."

Some of the fishermen who had been congratulating Scott at the pool table were starting to stare openly in their direction, despite the sheltering walls of the booth.

Rogue jumped to her feet, took Scott's arm and pulled him out of his seat.

"Come see my truck, Scott. You'll love it."

"You don't want to meet my friends?" he teased, but walked out of the bar without taking back his arm.

"They're about as much your friends as, I don't know, the President. Otherwise you'd have been dragging me over for introductions."

"We're pretty near to DC. I could be friends with the President for all you know," Scott replied haughtily.

Rogue laughed out loud, and was startled to find herself surprised at the noise.

They called a taxi, and headed back to the distribution centre, where Rogue's truck was still backed up to the loading bay, though the shippers who were meant to be packing it were on a meal break. Scott walked up one side of the huge, electric blue machine and its huge white trailer, then back and around the cab, highly impressed.

"You're looking after it well."

Rogue swung herself up into the cabin, high above the concrete floor. "Of course I am! It's not exactly a new truck, but it does me fine. Hop up." She held out a hand, and Scott grabbed it, climbing easily into the broad, spring-supported seat with her. Suddenly, in such close quarters, Rogue put her hand on Scott's bare face.

"You could have told us you were alive."

He shrugged. "If I'd gone back, I'd have never gotten out again. I'm not as tough as you are."

"Not tough. Just solitary. It's not like I had to fight to get free. They would have hung on to you 'til the day you died."

"And after." His voice was soft, but certain.

"Yeah. And after."

Scott turned his face away from her hand, but she seized his chin and pulled him back to look her in the eye.

"That's not what I want. I've got a life here. Well, everywhere, really. I don't want your life."

"And I don't want yours. Just this." He leaned forward, sending her fingers sliding up his face to touch the delicate skin at his temples, and kissed her. She opened her mouth and kissed him back, hard, determined not to let go of this man who she simultaneously found so familiar and so foreign. She knew he was feeling the same contradiction as he wound one hand into the safety of her long hair but touched her soft skin with wonder.

Naked in both body and intent, their layers of protective, concealing clothing shed, Rogue and Scott retreated together to the bunk in the back of the cab, pulling the curtains around them to create a shadowed and separate world. They both laughed when their hands met reaching for Rogue's carefully shelved box of condoms, but their laughter dimmed to murmurs as their bodies met on the floral sheets of the thin mattress.

They slept a short while, but Rogue kept an eye on the clock and dragged their clothes over when it was time to get moving and go check on her load.

"Here. You'd better head back." She handed him his shirt, and reached out her leg to hook his pants and pull them over to the curtained area of the cab.

Scott dressed efficiently, despite the semi-darkness, and Rogue was briefly reminded of his old glasses and closed expression. He smiled then and the memory dissipated in an instant. When her head popped out of the neck hole of her sweater, he leaned forward and kissed her again.

"Hey," she grinned. "Don't get soppy."

"Wouldn't dream of it."

"Give me your address. If you're lucky, I'll send you a postcard."

Her load secured and the huge engine rumbling, Rogue pulled away from the cavernous warehouse and back to the almost empty midnight highway. She was more tired than she liked, but at the same time she felt tremendously awake - connected but unfettered, cared for but not smothered. She grinned. She was going to have to twist the dispatcher's arm to send her back to Annapolis some time. Until then, she had eighteen wheels under her, over eighty thousand pounds of truck and load behind her and an impossible deadline to meet. Rogue was her own woman, and nothing, and no one, could take that from her.


End file.
